You could just put your boot partition somewhere else on the disk, but if you're OCD, that won't do. Besides, moving partitions around has the side effect of defragmentation, if you do it right. Boot from CD, purge your tmp directories, then 'cp -a' each partition somewhere else (ideally, with the destination partition(s) mounted with the same options as the originals, as it pertains to atimes and that sort of thing). Then fix your partitions and 'cp -a' it all back. You can do a byte-wise copy or move using dd or the equivalent (which is what most partition utility "move" and "copy" functions do, I think), but that wastes time moving all your empty space, does not defragment the filesystem, and replicates any filesystem errors. Tar and compression might be useful, but if your disk is less than half full, you have no issue, and I'm not sure it actually saves any time unless you're copying somewhere over the network.

I've done this sort of thing several times without problems, so if you destroy your data, it's not my fault.

Thankfully indeed. It is rather idiotic and wasteful (maybe it can help serve as an example of why so many of us think government should be smaller and less powerful, etc.)_________________The First of April. The day when people critically evaluate information from the internet before accepting it as true.

after much procrastinating, I just ran gparted. gparted does not let you delete a device if you have mounted file systems with higher numbers. My OS is on a higher number partition, so I couldn't do that. So, instead of deleting /dev/sda6 and creating a super /dev/sda5, I just shrank sda6 to as small as I could (9MB) and moved and grew /dev/sda5. Now i have 180 big ones (MB) for /boot.

seems to have worked. I guess proof will be in the rebooting. Curses will follow if I have trouble.